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Addy Osmani is Head of Chrome Developer Experience at Google, where he leads teams focused on improving performance, tooling, and the overall developer experience for building on the web. If you’ve ever opened Chrome’s Developer Tools bar, you’ve definitely used features Addy has built. He’s also the author of several books, including his latest, Beyond Vibe Coding, which explores how AI is changing software development.

In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Addy to discuss how AI is reshaping software engineering workflows, the tradeoffs between speed and quality, and why understanding generated code remains critical. We dive into his article The 70% Problem, which explains why AI tools accelerate development but struggle with the final 30% of software quality—and why this last 30% is tackled easily by software engineers who understand how the system actually works.